


Ad Nauseam (Canon Pronoun Edit)

by Interrobam



Series: Canon Pronoun Edit [1]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2000-09-17
Updated: 2000-09-17
Packaged: 2018-04-21 04:58:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4815875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Interrobam/pseuds/Interrobam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Rung had spoken the word of his frame, once. But the Functionists had risen, and it had become necessary for him to become inviolate. He could not survive as a body marked for annihilation. He could not speak the word of a body which was pain."</p><p>Edit of "Ad Nauseam" with Canon Pronouns for those triggered by noncanon pronouns.</p><p>(Please Visit Original for Full Tags/Warnings: http://archiveofourown.org/works/4815830)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ad Nauseam (Canon Pronoun Edit)

Rung’s body was a symphony.

Rung’s frame was a clatter, an orchestra. The click of gears meeting at the teeth, the hum of a steady spark, the gulp of a fuel pump, whispers of energon through lines and electricity through circuits. The hiss of a T-Cog skipping, the groan of a taxed spinal strut, the chime of an empty tank, a cackling rust infection he was neglecting. Rung’s body was history transcribed in the tongue of the allspark.

Rung had spoken the word of his frame, once. But the Functionists had risen, and it had become necessary for him to become inviolate. He could not survive as a body marked for annihilation. He could not speak the word of a body which was _pain_.

\---

Rung pressed the pad of his thumb to his thoracic plating, buffed back and forth until he half felt half heard the minute disruption, the hint of irregularity in the surface. He traced the line, a crude path of shallow divots and crumbs of welding, from the window of his spark chamber to the base of his collar and back down. _It happened_ , his sensornet told him, despite the self repair protocols that had long since reintegrated the dead welding into his living plating, despite the distortion that had long since come to his phantom pains, _it was real_. 

\---

Some of him was missing.

As the Functionists’ power had begun to wane, Rung had started to knit back together, but some of him was long greyed, could not be weld back to his protoform. Some of him had been carved from his struts, sloughed off in an operation, broken off in shards, left to rot on some Institute floor.

Not his body, oh no, that had been too precious to discard. That had been tagged and labeled and carved and sampled to exhaustion. He spoke of his “secret” compartments as if every portion of his frame had not been mapped and marked and categorized thrice. No fraction of Rung had been kept discreet, had escaped inspection. It was only the parts of him which the surgeons had not cared to preserve that had degraded under their ministrations: his mind, the thrum of his spark, his benevolence.

These things which Rung could only access as phantoms.

\---

Rung resented them for doing such a clean job, the last time they sealed him back up. He’d rather have weldscars everywhere they had cut him open, so that at least he could have a catalogue, a record to check his memories against. He had a memory of them peeling back his facial plating, a thousand precise cuts-- dissecting his persona, degrading his being. His optics blooming open, paralyzed by the boosters but able to feel, to see everything. He had a memory that was vivid and detailed and smelled like energon, but when he traced his fingers over his facial plating he couldn't find the corresponding scars. 

He _thought_ he remembered, but there were so many impossible things he remembered. 

The stress on his sensornet had been immense, agony overtaxing the instruments that constructed his vision, his hearing, his orientation in space and time. His processor had strained to make impossible connections, run illogical protocols, which led to hallucinations and distortions of reality. During one episode he‘d talked to a sphere of light, like a unframed spark, in pictographs. At a different moment he had floated above his body, watching the operation without any sensation of pain.

So maybe they never touched his face, never opened his plating like the iris of a camera, never plucked his wires out of alignment. He couldn't find the scars. He couldn't say for sure. 

\---

Under ultraviolet light the back of his neck lit up like a poppy field.

\---

Rung had known even then, even in that dark night, that there was no _actual_ self discrete from frame. He had plotted oily inscribed brain modules with his fingers. He had peeled back layers of neurocircuitry, cut them to pieces. He had seen sparks flicker and fade: often, too often. Rung was his body, his body was Rung. He was never meant to be fractured.

 _A being which is subject to violence must react_ , he told himself. _It must construct coping mechanisms, defenses. It must butcher and siphon the integrity of the mind for the survival of the spark. Serenity is comely, but one cannot make fuel out of it._

If he had not split he would have shattered.

\---

He thought about petitioning Ratchet for the use of an ultraviolet lamp. 

They were rare and precious things: a fully stocked hospital might have three, a police district two. Ratchet's medbay, ever equipped, had one. Rung skittered around the idea of asking. He trusted Ratchet-- or came as close as he could-- but he did not trust hospital slabs. He did not trust spark monitors, the smell of ozone and energon, little red crosses. He liked Ratchet, but he did not like the idea of explaining _why_ he needed the lamp to Ratchet. He could have lied, said it was for a patient, claimed confidentiality.

His tanks roiled at the thought.

\---

They had not called Rung by his name, and he had hoped they would never start. How nice it would be, he had thought, once everything was over, that every time he heard his name spoken he would remember that he was not there.

\---

Rung had come, after a while, to accept his brief fantastic trips out of reality (geometric shapes and motes of colored lights had appeared in the air and seemed real enough to touch). They had not always been pleasant, but they distracted (parasites had run through his energon lines, too small to see but crawling so that he had itched until he scraped his paint off). 

He discovered fairly early the trick of becoming something not-Rung, an impartial and indifferent observer of everything done to and by him. At those times his hallucinations were more solid than his reality. Rung sometimes had the impression that he could simply wave his hand and dissolve the entire Institute into smoke and soot, that he had the absolute power to stop this at any time paired with a complete avolition to do so.

Its funny, what the processor decides it can and cannot tolerate.

\---

He switched the hab suite lights off and glowed like starlight.

His mutilated plating sang with luminescence: the ragged seams of weldscars long smoothed, the delicate dappling of needlemarks, the architecture of his burned out circuitry. Under the lamp that Nautica had lent him, carefully affixed to the wall, he was a beacon in the dark. The palms of his hands looked like a cross section of a diseased brain module. The weldscar where his thumb had been reattached looked like a ring. His reflection flickered on his berthroom window, catching his optic.

He stared at himself. 

The glowing webwork of scars cut off with disturbing abruptness across the middle of his face. The newest portion of his helm, constructed whole by Ratchet’s former hands, was swallowed in darkness. He looked two-faced in his reflection, a galaxy of memory embossed against the cold yawning void of space. If he turned his helm at a certain angle, offlined his optics, he appeared utterly helmless. He lifted his hand to his face, traced a sharp and surgical line of luminance from the bridge of his nose to the corner of his optic.

It had been so long since any part of his body was new.

\---

Rung’s body was an almanac.

Rung’s frame was a ledger, a directory of phenomena, a calendar of debt. Rung’s frame had been annotated and crossed out, inscribed at every inch with a language that he had, perhaps, once spoken.

A word that he may yet speak again.


End file.
